The new EmergLondon.ca has finally been launched! Its been a long time in the making, and while its still not done, we were able to make a number of significant changes. We will continue work on the site in weeks (& months) ahead.
We have ported over all the content from the old site and made it more “digestible”. We have also cleaned up the menu system, making it simpler and more logical (IMHO.) There are still a lot of cosmetic fixes I need to make, but the bulk of the “behind the scenes” work is done.
I want to draw your attention to a couple of new features…
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Academic Calendar. I tried out about 5 different calendar systems, and while its not the cleanest solution, I finally settled on Google Calendar for a number of reasons, the most important one is this: It is completely iCal compliant. It can therefore import / export / sync with most other desktop calendars including Outlook, iCal, Symbian, Blackberry and even the iPhone. This is HUGE. The other calendar I had been trying is better integrated into the site (making it easier to manaage locally) but lacks the iCal feature.
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Staff Profiles. Every user now has a profile page that is visible to everyone, however your personal information is visible only to those members who are logged in - meaning you can keep everyone up to date with regards to addresses / phone numbers and most importantly - email addresses. We have currently hidden all the email addresses (except for Gary of course) however if you would like yours to be visible, LMK and I’ll figure out a way to provide that on per user basis.
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Downloads. The schedules will be available as they previously were, but now we have also included a section for other EM related material (rounds, cases, photos, clipart, journal articles etc). I am working on the details of the copyright issues related to offering journal articles, however recent conversations I have had with the people @ the annals and the NEJM lead me to believe we should be able to share journal articles in an academic setting without the risk of copyright violations. There’s not much content there now, but you can add whatever you want. I havent really tested it, although I have used the same system on other sites and it works quite well.
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Forum. The discussion forum currently runs off a 3rd party solution, and hence I need a “bridge” to keep the 2 user bases in sync - its a real pain in the ass. I would like to move to an integrated forum solution, however porting the data from one to other is not simple. Am I wasting my time even thinking about this? Should we just start over and scrap the data thats already here? Or do we even need a forum at all?
We have included a couple of polls with regards to the above issues - if you could take 1 minute and answer the 2 simple questions we have it would be greatly appreciated.
The [URL=http://emlondon.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=150][B]calendar question[/B] is here[/URL]. The [URL=http://emlondon.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=151][B]forum question[/B] is here[/URL].
Big kudos to the [B]Yeti [/B]who helped me port over much of the content from the old site, and will helping to maintain the new site! Thanks [B]Jan[/B]!
Thats all for now. More updates as things evolve…
AEJ